- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2011 10:53:12 -0400
- To: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- Cc: Lin Clark <lin.w.clark@gmail.com>, Leigh Dodds <leigh.dodds@talis.com>, "public-lod@w3.org" <public-lod@w3.org>
On Fri, 2011-10-21 at 09:17 -0400, Jonathan Rees wrote: [ . . . ] > There's a different question that I skipped over because it seems > unrelated, which is whether you need different URIs for different > things. +1 > I'm not certain how to answer that. This is an > interoperability issue. If a URI U refers to two documents A and B, > and I say <U> has title "Right", which document am I referring to, A > or B? That is, which has that title? (or author, etc.) Either you > don't care, in which case there's no reason to say it, or you care, in > which case you have to invent some additional signal to communicate > the distinction. Right, though I would call it an application issue rather than an interoperability issue, because whether or not it is important to distinguish the two depends entirely on the application. Ambiguity/unambiguity should not be viewed as an absolute, but as *relative* to a particular application or class of applications: a URI that is completely unambiguous to one application may be hopelessly ambiguous to a different application that requires finer distinctions. See "Resource Identity and Semantic Extensions: Making Sense of Ambiguity" http://dbooth.org/2010/ambiguity/paper.html > > The question of how many URIs you need has almost nothing to do with > httpRange-14. It would arise no matter how you ended up choosing > between direct vs. indirect. +1. With or without httpRange-14, there will always be URIs that are unambiguous to some applications and ambiguous to others. This is the inescapable consequence of the fact that, for the most part, it is impossible to define anything completely unambiguously -- a principle well discussed and established in philosophy. -- David Booth, Ph.D. http://dbooth.org/ Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.
Received on Friday, 21 October 2011 14:53:49 UTC